What made her exceptional, however, was that as a rather bored countess before the war, she used to enjoy smuggling cigarettes into Poland over the high Tatra mountains, so she also knew the secret routes into and out of the country. Skarbek’s medals, including the French Croix de Guerre and the British George Medal. Skarbek spoke Polish, French, and English, and had excellent contacts in Warsaw and around the country. Nevertheless in late 1939, when she demanded – rather than volunteered – to be taken on, her skills and knowledge made her impossible to turn down.īritain was anxious to know how the Nazis were organising inside occupied Poland. Most SIS officers and agents were recruited through the ‘old boys’ network’, and Skarbek was neither British nor male. The daughter of a Polish aristocrat and Jewish banking heiress, and a pre-war Polish beauty queen, Skarbek was not an obvious prospect for the British Secret Intelligence Services. Yet she died just seven years after the end of the conflict, murdered in a south London hotel with a commando knife much like the one she herself had carried during the war. Her extraordinary contribution to the Allied effort in three theatres of the war led to her being presented with the George Medal and OBE in Britain, the Croix de Guerre with one star from France, and enough ribbons to make any general proud. Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, was the first woman to work for Britain as a special agent during the Second World War.